EDITORIAL. THE Annual Conference of the Library Association will soon be upon us, and we understand that the Council of the L.A. is well advanced in the matter of its arrangements. We sincerely hope, however, that it is not too late for us to emphasize the importance of a less crowded programme. There was a multitude of matters dealt with at Cardiff, but the time" bogey was ever en evidence. There can be no practical use for points to be raised obviously inviting discussion, and then for those interested to have no opportunity either to commend, correct or condemn certain statements made. There were many brilliant orations unspoken at Cardiff ! Pleasant platitudes are soothing, but we have a recollection of one librarian and a lady at that-commenting on one address as offal," or word to that effect. We want practical papers instead of pleasantries: fewer papers and more opportunity for an exchange of views. Let the Conference be a conference! The Westminster City Councillors may or may not be wise in their generation, but in one way they are not to be congratulated. The proposed extension of the City Hall, necessitating the closing of the Public Library in St. Martin's Lane, is like the old saying of Robbing Peter to pay Paul." We should much have preferred the City Hall to be closed to permit of an extension of the Public Library! But there it is. Various newspapers are endeavouring to show the City Council the error of its ways. The Public Libraries Committee is to be commiserated with. In the opinion of many the Council is taking an illegal action! If the matter is brought into the courts the case will be of more than local interest, for no Public Library will be safe if the action of the Westminster Council is upheld. Westminster, of all places! We note that there is some agitation for a Public Library for Golder's Green, and we hope that the proposal will materialize. Just as no home is complete without a certain much-advertised household commodity, so no town or district is complete without a public library. Didn't the Rt. Hon. H. A. L. Fisher say that it was a place" without light," or words to that effect? We look forward to the "light" shining on Golder's Green ere long, whatever the opponents of the proposal do to urge the inhabitants to continue to sit in darkness.' " There is still that monotonous cry for economy" going on, until librarians are beginning to think that it is their monopoly. The sooner some of these penny-minded councillors and committeemen get a bigger conception of public libraries the better, both for the public and themselves. The continued "cutting" of library estimates is becoming a disease! EARLY PRINTING IN CHINA: SOME NEW EVIDENCE [FROM THE REPORT OF THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS, 1922.] AMONG the more interesting of the many valuable Chinese books received during the past year may be noted the Nung shu of Wang Chên, a treatise on agriculture published during the Yüan or Mongol Dynasty. The original work was lost by the time Emperor Ch'ien Lung began his search for rare and valuable books in the latter half of the eighteenth century. His commission of scholars was so impressed with the value of this work that they ordered it copied out of the great encyclopedic dictionary Yung loh ta tien, in which the work has been incorporated, chapter by chapter and paragraph by paragraph. The reconstructed Nung shu was then printed by Imperial order at the Wu ying tien press. An excellent copy of this edition was secured for the Library of Congress; it is in 22 books and 8 volumes. The original preface is reprinted; it is dated Huang Ch'ing, kuei ch'ou or 1313 A.D. In an appendix of supreme interest the ingenious and original Wang Chên tells of his experiments in making movable type, mentioning a newly used method of making movable type by casting them out of metal poured into matrices. He made his set of type, however, out of wood and then invented a new type case made of two revolving tables divided into very many boxes to hold the multitudinous different characters of the Chinese written language. By sitting in the middle between the revolving tables the typesetter was able to reach without trouble any desired character. When it is realised that the Nung shu was published in 1313 A.D. and that it was not the first work that the author had printed with his movable types (he had previously issued a gazetteer of the district for which he was magistrate) it is clear that evidence of the greatest significance regarding the discovery of printing from movable types is here forthcoming. Through the co-operation of the University of Nanking, a copy of a Ming Dynasty reprint of the Nung shu has been located in a Chinese library in Nanking and the effort is now being made to collate the reprint with the reconstructed Ch'ien Lung edition. The finding of a copy of the original Yuan Dynasty edition of the Nung shu or of Wang Chên's gazetteer printed directly from his font of movable type would mark an epoch in the history of the art of printing. With the cooperation of the faculty and especially of those of the student body of the University of Nanking, whose home districts lie in or close to those wherein Wang Chên lived when he printed his two works with movable types, it may yet prove possible to bring to light these two precious works. It is becoming increasing evident that not only the making of paper but all the ordinary devices for printing, such as blocks to print whole pages, movable type engraved on wood or metal or moulded on soft clay afterwards baked hard, movable type cast of metal in matrices, printing ink, multicolour presses, in fact, almost everything we have now except the linottype, were discovered by the Chinese. That the whole world owes to the Chinese the discovery of the basic art of civilization, printing on paper, cannot longer be doubted. CO-OPERATIVE CATALOGUING* By R. WRIGHT (Librarian of Middlesex County Libraries). CO-OPERATIVE Cataloguing is oft times a misnomer for a system of composite cataloguing. By the act of co-operation all should take their share of the burden, and all should benefit from the results of the distributed load. Such principles are entirely absent from the public library economy of this country, which is administered either from the autocratic aspect of the county borough-too important to take notice of the smaller committees or from the point of view of the village pump, with an outlook limited in dimensions to its own geographical boundaries. This is not a personal matter, but is a local government condition common to all departments, although perhaps exaggerated in the public library movement. An enlightened public library policy in the future may tend to widen this narrow outlook, and we feel that there is a place for the question of co-operative effort in any discussion of public library policy. We would suggest that the principle of co-operation can be usefully applied to many of the functions of the public library, and there appears to be no practical reason why it has not been adopted in library cataloguing. The cataloguing of a collection of books is one of the primary duties of a librarian, and in any modern library system a large proportion of the time of the senior staff is employed in this work. It is unnecessary to state that the value of a collection of books is increased in ratio to the amount of time spent on the catalogue, but we do so to indicate the inverse nature of the economics of our library systems. On the one hand we have the larger libraries with specialised staffs employed in cataloguing, a highly efficient machine producing the best type of work. On the other hand, we have the harrassed librarians in the smaller libraries endeavouring to do the same work amidst his numerous other duties. It is not surprising that there are varying degrees of cataloguing, but the point that I wish to make is that where cataloguing is most required-in the smaller library-it is ofttimes deficient, purely from lack of time and opportunity to carry it out. As a County Librarian who has organised two of these much despised institutions since the war, I appreciate the force of these remarks. In the first place I have had to catalogue some thousands of books in duplicate-in Wilts. and again in Middlesexin itself a considerable waste of time and energy. But what is more important, being one of those unfortunate librarians with a staff of minus quantity, the cataloguing has resolved itself into a routine task carried out as one of the processes of circulating books. Now, if ever efficient cataloguing is essential it is in circulating libraries. Where choice of books has to be made from a printed catalogue, it cannot be too carefully and elaborately prepared. Hence I realise that my hasty work is inadequate, and I am foisting on my community an inefficient library service that will have to be remodelled at some later date. Now this condition is not special A paper read before the Library Association at Westminster Public Library, Great Smith Street, S.W., on May 26th, 192-3 to the rural libraries; it has happened in the organisation of many of the town libraries. Reflect on the state of affairs at your own libraries, and although full cataloguing may now be carried out you will recall that the earlier additions, ofttimes the most important books, are catalogued on the principle of a line per entry. This, you will agree, is totally inadequate. In coming into contact with the librarian of the smaller library one hears the constant complaint of lack of time to carry out some of the activities which at present are the monopoly of the larger libraries. It is a serious condition when we remember that some eighty per cent. of the libraries come under this catagory, and it appears to me to be useless to speak of inadequate local finance, for many of our libraries have been established on relatively unsound economic conditions. The point is that these libraries are in existence, and they have either to fulfil their functions or decay. " .. At the Rural Library Conference of 1921, Colonel Mitchell said of librarians : He is of no use who makes of his office a shrine in which to worship St. Dewey of the Decimal system, or St. Cutter of the catalogue." Whilst there was a feeling that in this remark the Colonel was tending to despise the value of cataloguing, we feel that there is much truth in the statement. If librarians in the past had not been such idolators, we should have had some co-operative effort in cataloguing. There are economic conditions that make it imperative for duplication of labour, such as two or more milkmen delivering milk in the same street, but in the case of library cataloguing it is not so. During the next six months, to take an instance, all the public libraries in this country will be cataloguing such standard works as Churchill's World Crisis. Probably some three hundred will be printing the entries, and many librarians will be raking their brains -or the preface of the books-to write annotations. As a parallel picture we realise that there are inefficient libraries employing antiquarian methods; there are libraries not attempting any extension work; there is practically no personal touch between the senior staff and the readers; and let us face facts and admit that there has been little real development in public libraries during the past twenty years.* Many will probably say that I have laboured these points, and that my statements are not only bold but insupportable. It may be so, and I claim indulgence, because I feel that the key position to a successful library movement is the small library. The solution of that problem is in the hands of the librarian of the small library, and at present he is a mere machine with no time for thought. If he can be provided with that time, we feel that is sufficient case for some scheme of co-operative cataloguing. This problem has been discussed in its various phases since about 1860, yet nothing practical has matured. I do not propose to make any reference to these earlier suggestions, all of which presuppose the setting up of elaborate machinery, whilst in the * The introduction of mechanical devices cannot be described as progress, as the principles underlying them were in actual practice 20 years ago, and their gradual adoption might rather be termed "delayed reform." See the first edition of Brown's Manual of Library Economy, published in 1903. The point is that the real problems of library politics are still unsolved. majority of cases limiting their efforts to the catalogue as a bibliographical guide rather than a practical aid in library administration. I should prefer to limit my remarks to the practical aspect of the subject, which may be summed up as follows: (a) To provide a catalogue of standard works, which may be used in varying forms, as the catalogue of an individual library or as the catalogue of the libraries in one area or zone. (b) The production of entries for new books to supplement the original nucleus catalogue. Inasmuch as there are already a number of excellent catalogues in existence, the problem does not appear to be involved. We will endeavour to state the difficulties that have prevented its inauguration, some real and some imaginary, but at heart we feel that it is the imaginary objections that have been the greatest handicap in the past. To summarise these obstacles : : (a) The organisation to undertake the work, and the necessary liaison with the publishers to secure the books for the catalogue. (b) Expense. (c) The varying cataloguing rules adopted in libraries. (d) The different forms of catalogues in use. (e) The difficulty of making one annotation serve all types of communities. That all librarians must apply their own classification numbers to secure uniformity with previous local decisions, and to meet local requirements. (g) The fear that co-operative effort will disparage originality and resolve into the stereotyping of library administration. (h) The local librarian should do his own cataloguing, as ofttimes it is his only opportunity of examining new books. (i) The catalogue would not be inclusive enough to satisfy the requirements of the large libraries, or inversely that the catalogue would be too inclusive for the small libraries. (1) The publication of entries would be delayed, whereas immediate publication and punctuality are absolutely essential. Our best method of procedure would be to examine these difficulties one by one and endeavour to arrive at a practical scheme. EXPENSE. The cost of production of large catalogues is high owing to the limited editions that have to be produced, and the cost of the special printing. The Library of Congress cards were produced before the war at approximately 1d. for the first card, and d. for additional cards, while their subscribers numbered over 1,500. We can approximate the cost in England by assuming that 500 libraries would co-operate, and would each require two complete sets of cards. Thus we can base our estimate on 1,000 copies of each entry, which would cost : 1,000 cards - Total cost of production 15s. 7s. 6d. 22s. 6d. |